Boris Johnson's ruinous ambition Boris Johnson's ruinous ambition 10 things you need to know today Today's best articles The week's best photojournalism Daily business briefing One day in 2004, Boris Johnson was interrupted on his morning jog by a pack of tabloid reporters massed outside his house in north London. They asked about rumors that Johnson, then editor of The Spectator magazine and a member of Parliament, had once had an extramarital affair, gotten his lover pregnant, and paid for her abortion. The chronically disheveled Johnson, wearing voluminous shorts and a bandanna decorated with skulls and crossbones, responded with his usual cocktail of charm, bluster, and obfuscation. Having already dismissed the story as "a completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture" and "an inverted pyramid of piffle," he cheerily advised the reporters to "go for a run, get some exercise, and have a beautiful day." He was lying. The reports were correct, and he was fired from his parliamentary job as the Conservative Party's arts spokesman. But it didn't seem to bother him too much.

Johnson has always had a knack for recasting disaster as farce, and he devoted his weekly newspaper column to the virtues of being fired. "Nothing excites compassion, in friend and foe alike," he wrote, "as much as the sight of you kersplonked on the tarmac with your propeller buried six feet under." Johnson, 52, has had a singularly charmed life, always wafting upward on a Teflon cloud of charm and guile even as people have questioned his integrity, seriousness, and competence. But not anymore. Having gambled his political future on the chance to lead his party and country through the aftermath of the Brexit referendum on whether to exit the European Union, Johnson found last month that his luck had run out. He withdrew from the race to be Conservative Party leader. In the end, he was done in as much by his own hubris, lack of preparation, and bewilderment in the face of the Brexit result as he was by the treachery and dwindling support of his colleagues.

As he abandoned his campaign to be leader — and with it, probably, his chances of ever being prime minister — he seemed almost relieved to be spared the burden of running the country he had done so much to destabilize. For a student of Shakespeare, which Johnson is (he is writing a biography), the situation was replete with ironies. A man who had spent his life behaving like Falstaff and making merry in the pub had failed to convince his party, and perhaps himself, that he had somehow suddenly turned into Prince Hal, poised to lead the country through its crisis in Europe. After Johnson announced he wouldn't seek the Conservative leadership, the anger at him was palpable, replacing the initial anger at Prime Minister David Cameron for calling the referendum in the first place. The sense that Johnson had presided over the Brexit campaign without any plan for what to do if it won — and then walked away without clearing up his mess — was particularly enraging. "He's like a general who marches his army to the sound of guns and the moment he sees the battleground abandons it," Michael Heseltine, a Tory politician, told the BBC. "I have never seen anything like it. He ripped the Tory party apart.

He has created the greatest constitutional crisis in peacetime in my life." Just a few days earlier, Johnson, the former mayor of London, had seemed poised to coast into position as prime minister when Cameron steps down in the fall. Outside London, at least before the referendum, he was the Conservative Party's star candidate, a populist maverick for the times. With his air of disarrayed befuddlement, his crazy coiffure, his idiosyncratically imaginative P.G. Wodehousian locution, his habit of slipping into Latin and Greek, his foot-in-the-mouth self-deprecation, and his obvious delight in himself, he oozes a charm rarely seen in politicians. He cycles to work and carries his things in a backpack. He looks as if he's slept in his clothes and just gotten out of bed. He has the privileged demeanor of an old Etonian (he went to school there), but a Bill Clinton–esque way with crowds and an appeal that transcends class.

In headlines he is "BoJo"; to most Britons he is simply "Boris." But his surface success has always carried along with it a reputation for lies, evasions, and exaggerations; a lack of seriousness and discipline; a tendency to wade blindly into situations without thinking through their ramifications; and a perception that he puts his own ambitions first. He has a habit of deflecting tough questions and affecting an amused insouciance about his mistakes, which have included fathering a child with a woman other than his wife (he and his wife, a lawyer, have four children). He is better on the big picture than he is on the details. Take the June 27 column by Johnson in The Daily Telegraph, the first substantive statement anyone from the Brexit side had made since the vote. As chaos swirled outside and Britain waited nervously for a sign that someone had a plan, Johnson produced a shoddily prepared article that seemed uncertain of its facts and backtracked on a number of key Brexit promises. Supporters of Johnson said at the time that the article had been written hastily and turned in late, and should be treated more as a first draft than as a definitive statement.

It was as a journalist who played around with the facts that Johnson first made his name. He was fired from his first reporting job, at The Times of London, for inventing a quote and attributing it to an Oxford professor (who happened to be his godfather). But he was hired anyway by The Daily Telegraph and sent to Brussels in 1989 to cover the European Union. It was a boring assignment, but Johnson found a way of enlivening it: He made things up. His great talent was to take tiny grains of information in reports and proposals, repackage them as official European policy, and present them as part of a broad narrative about Brussels' risibility. His stories were full of wrong-size condoms, fishermen forced to wear hairnets, and international disputes over cheese policy. While his stories became increasingly influential in the Euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party, and in many ways set the tone for the British papers' coverage of Europe ever since, Johnson tends to treat his approach as great fun. "I was just chucking these rocks over the garden wall and listening to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England," he told an interviewer.

"Everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power." After Brussels, Johnson became editor of The Spectator, which functions as a kind of house organ for conventional Conservative Party wisdom, and began writing a popular weekly column in The Daily Telegraph. In 2001 he won a seat in Parliament. I was in London at the time and wrote a profile of Johnson. He boasted to me in the humble-brag way peculiar to British upper-class men that, trying to juggle three jobs, he was unable to do any of them properly. "Because I have no time to do it, I do it in no time," he said, of his Telegraph column. "You just whack it out." Johnson seemed constitutionally incapable of taking anything truly seriously. Deciding he did not feel like being photographed for The New York Times article, for instance, he got another man in the Spectator office to impersonate him in the photo session. The photographer duly snapped away, until the magazine's publisher found out what was going on and made Johnson sit for the portrait.

(He was 37 at the time.) Around then, Johnson also became a bona fide celebrity, honing his trademark persona as a hyperarticulate upper-class twit for the masses in a string of highly amusing appearances on the current events quiz show Have I Got News for You. Viewers adored him. "His charming, bumbling buffoon image was neatly done and went down very well with audiences," said Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye magazine and a panelist on the show. In 2008, Johnson unexpectedly ran for mayor of London, and even more unexpectedly for a Conservative in a Labour city, he won. The same complaints that had dogged him in the past dogged him in office, along with criticisms that he had failed to address serious issues like air quality and affordable housing. "We had eight frustrating years where we'd ask detailed policy questions, and what we'd get back in response was bluster and grandiose claims," said Joanne McCartney, a Labour Assembly member who is now deputy mayor.

"If he didn't know the answer to the question, which was a regular occurrence, he'd use bluster and wit to avoid answering." Johnson all along denied that he wanted to be prime minister, saying it was about as likely as his being "reincarnated as an olive." But he has always been wittier, quicker, and more charismatic than Cameron. The 2012 London Olympics proved the perfect showcase for his off-the-cuff anarchic wit. Filmed stranded haplessly on a malfunctioning zip line, Johnson took an incident that would have humiliated most other politicians and somehow used it to burnish his appeal. (A photograph of him dangling was used to quite different effect last month on the cover of the French newspaper Libération.) Cameron has always been threatened by Johnson; his efforts to slough off the mayor as a kind of amusing Tory mascot never worked. But it wasn't until Johnson betrayed the prime minister by throwing his support behind the Brexit campaign that the party saw the extent of BoJo's ambition. Before now, Johnson has rarely been confronted by a situation he could not maneuver his way through.

But a harbinger came in March, when he was summoned before a House of Commons committee and forensically interrogated by its Javert-like Tory chairman, Andrew Tyrie, about a series of statements he had made over the years about Europe. Johnson tried his normal humorous approach. Asked, for instance, about his assertion that the European Union has a law saying that balloons cannot be blown up by children under 8 (it doesn't), he deflected the question, saying, "In my household, only children under 8 are allowed to blow up balloons." He continued in this vein throughout the session, as Tyrie peered unsmilingly at him, acid in his voice. "This is all very interesting, Boris," Tyrie said at one point. "Except none of it is really true, is it?" Excerpted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times . Reprinted with permission. The Observer profile: Boris Johnson | Politics | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close In his salad days, when up at Oxford, Boris Johnson took it upon himself to put on a play loosely based on the scribblings of the Roman historian Suetonius.

Only, a typical Johnson wheeze this, the youthful classicist decided to give the venerable work a Dadaist slant, producing a culture clash that bitterly divided his three-strong audience. But, then, Johnson, editor of the Spectator and Tory shadow minister, has always revelled in such collisions, no more so than when they conspire around himself. Despite his plummy sounding old Etonian vowels and his deep suspicion of much of popular culture, Johnson has been embraced into the bosom of a normally cynical British public thanks to his stellar performances on Have I Got News For You. He is the bicycling commuter whose addiction to fast driving may soon cost him his licence and who, despite his true blue roots, lives in the New Labour spiritual heartland of Islington. He is the political fool whose talent for self deprecation seems to become ever more acute the further his career advances. (Following an interview with the New York Times the heavyweight paper dispatched a photographer to take a portrait of Johnson, only for him to send a Spectator colleague to be snapped in his place.

It was only after some serious strong arming from Kimberly Fortier, Johnson's boss at the magazine, that a protesting Boris was forced in front of the camera.) And now he looks set to become another contradiction: a politician capable of producing a truly comic novel. Next month we get Seventy Two Virgins, Johnson's first work of fiction which is being eagerly talked up in the book trade thanks in part to his two earlier works of non fiction, Friends, Voters, Countrymen and Lend Me Your Ears . Those who have read the novel say its typical Johnson: bathetic, rumbustious and giving the impression it was written at breakneck speed after several long lunches. A typical paragraph reads: 'He knew from experience that Mrs Onyeama's chicken Kievs had an amazing effect on the digestive system. There was nothing normally delectable, but from time to time the kraken would wake, and then a globule of air would force itself up the oesophagus and press on the palate.

Until he was obliged to let it go.' The novel's outlandish plot centres on a bumbling, bicycling MP who unwittingly stumbles into the world of global terrorism, but the real-life inspiration for such a character is nowhere near as shambolic. 'Shrewd' and 'sharp' are adjectives friends use to describe Johnson. 'Calculating' say opponents. 'Boris was always somebody who people recognised as having huge ability,' recalls Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Matthew Taylor, a contemporary at Oxford. 'But what has surprised many is the way Boris has turned himself more and more into a caricature.' Johnson clearly loves to play up the image that has served him so well, describing himself as a 'slowly masticating panda'. But the truth is Johnson is really a hippo. There may be big yawns on top but underneath the water he is paddling furiously to keep up with the big beasts. Last week the hippo bared its teeth, backing a campaign to impeach the Prime Minister on the grounds he mislead the public over the Iraq war. Johnson was conspicuous by the fact he was one of only two Tories to lend their names to the campaign.

'Boris is not afraid to stick his head above the parapet. He's a decent human being who sometimes finds it difficult to stay inside one party,' says Rod Liddle, a regular columnist on the Spectator . Conventional wisdom has it that Johnson may also find it difficult to juggle his positions in the dialectical worlds of journalism and politics. But Johnson is well versed in rebutting the claim. He is fond of namechecking Disraeli and Churchill (as he does in a glowing profile in the latest Vanity Fair ) as examples of politicians who have effectively balanced the dark arts with hackery. But, then, these eminent statesmen didn't have to match Johnson's diverse output. In addition to his books Johnson writes a weekly column for the Daily Telegraph, and a monthly one for GQ where he is motoring correspondent. And then there is the Spectator, currently in rude health. 'The credit for the rise in circulation is down to Boris and Boris alone,' Liddle says. 'He's been its best editor for ages.

He's made it more idiosyncratic which is exactly the right thing to do at a time when the Conservative Party is weakish.' Rumour has it Conrad Black, the magazine's former owner, was so delighted with Johnson's performance he offered him the editorship of the Spectator 's newspaper stablemate, the Daily Telegraph - on condition he renounced his political ambitions. It would have made Johnson a powerful man, but his political ambitions exceed his journalistic ones. As a former colleague remarked: 'He is just like any other politician or journalist: vain, sentimental and ambitious. Boris wants to go all the way to the top.' Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was born in New York on 19 June 1964, his birthplace due to the fact his father, Stanley, worked at the United Nations headquarters in the city. Johnson's mother, Charlotte, was an artist and, thanks to his parents' peripatetic lifestyle, the young Boris spent his formative years at a school in Brussels. After graduating from Balliol College, Johnson joined management consultants LEK. He lasted a week.

There followed a spell on the Times where Johnson failed to distinguish himself, on one occasion inventing a quote from an uncle who complained to the paper with the result his nephew left Rupert Murdoch's employ soon after. As the Telegraph 's Europe correspondent in the 1980s, Johnson made a name for himself with tales of heroic incompetence by Brussels bureaucrats. By 1995, Johnson was an assistant editor. Four years later he was handed the keys to the Spectator, following such right-leaning luminaries as Nigel Lawson and his son, Dominic, now Sunday Telegraph editor. A year after assuming the Spectator hot seat, Johnson's political aspirations were crystallised when he was elected MP for the safe Tory seat of Henley. Prior to this he had contested the unwinnable seat of Clwyd South, going as far as to learn some Welsh to impress the electorate. 'Turned out it was the only part of Wales where nobody speaks Welsh. Bit of a faux-pas,' Johnson recalled. Surveying his wondrous rise, the temptation to turn Johnson into a William Boot of the twenty-first century, a naive, richly comic hero whose good fortune is the result of unintended consequences, is almost too delicious.

But Johnson's life reads more Brideshead Revisited than Scoop . At Oxford he was part of a gilded circle whose privileged trajectory was never far from tragedy. Close friends included Charles Spencer, now Viscount Althrop and brother of Diana; Olivia Channon, the government minister's daughter who was to die of a drugs overdose; and Darius Guppy who was convicted of masterminding a £1.8 million insurance scam involving a staged gem heist. Guppy's relationship with Johnson has earned the latter some unwelcome press. While in prison Guppy was taped asking Johnson to help him get the address of a reporter. Guppy wanted the hack, who was investigating him, beaten up. A worried sounding Johnson is heard on the tape saying: 'OK, Darrie, I said I'll do it and I'll do it.' Johnson never went through with the plan and friends say it was merely the action of a friend trying to placate a desperate soul. Nevertheless, when the tape was aired on Have I Got News For You , Johnson's haphazard halo momentarily lost its shine.

That it glows greater now than ever is thanks to Johnson's industrious transformation from jobbing hack to comic institution, capable of raising smiles from political supporters of all hues. How many other politicians boast their own online fanzine? His charm is manifest at Spectator parties where a glass of bubbly is never far from his hand. 'He's an immense flirt, there's always a gaggle of women chasing him,' says a regular guest. Gossip columns have taken to speculating on Johnson's love life but friends say he is happily married to Marina Wheeler, a lawyer with whom he has four children. A first marriage to socialite Allegra Mostyn-Owen lasted less than a year. Although most of his success is down to stupendous amounts of hard work, timing has also played a part. A Tory party in the doldrums desperately needs some colour and Johnson, as its vice-chairman, is much in demand at constituency fundraisers across the shires.

Earlier this year he was rewarded with the position of shadow arts minister, a promotion that saw him unveil a six point plan for the arts, including the convening of a summit so that Damien Hirst could explain the point of the 'Saatchi mob' and the creation of an 'indistinguishable replica' of the Elgin marbles to restore relations with Greece. The hare-brained manifesto made for good copy, but such actions are risky according to Taylor: 'Characters may work in the media but they can only get so far in politics. Just ask Tony Banks.' It is a view echoed by those in the Conservative Party. Michael Portillo, a man who knows a thing or two about career decisions, once told Johnson to choose between politics and comedy. History has yet to record Johnson's response.

BORIS JOHNSON Look out world, here comes Boris | Bonokoski | Columnists | Opinion | Toronto Su Look out world, here comes Boris By Mark Bonokoski , Postmedia Network First posted: Wednesday, July 20, 2016 06:51 PM EDT | Updated: Wednesday, July 20, 2016 07:03 PM EDT Article There is a Conrad Black connection to Boris Johnson, the oddball politician chosen last week in an equally oddball decision by new British Prime Minister Theresa May to be her troubled country’s foreign affairs minister. Diplomacy is not among his virtues. This is the same Boris Johnson who, not untypically, wrote a nasty little limerick, albeit prior to last week’s military coup attempt in Turkey. It was about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan having sex with a farm animal. It was the hands-down winner of a contest in April by The Spectator magazine, an authoritative conservative publication in Britain where Johnson was once editor.

The magazine made no apologies about how it was looking for the most offensive poem possible, as it thought the Turkish president was being hypersensitive in attempting to sue a German comic over supposedly “offensive” remarks. Johnson was more than up to the task. His winning ditty read: “There was a young man from Ankara/Who was a terrific wankerer/Till he sowed his wild oats/With the help of a goat/But didn’t even stop to thankera.” Today this same man is Britain’s top foreign emissary, a position seemingly so out of context with reality that Johnson’s neighbour posted a sign outside the politician’s home that likely spoke for untold millions. “Sorry World,” it read. Conrad Black’s connection to Johnson goes back to 1999 when Black was at the top of his game, and proprietor of the prestigious broadsheet, the London Daily Telegraph, as well as owner of The Spectator. He wanted Johnson to move up from associate editor of the hugely-influential magazine to the editor’s position, and was willing to pay him major bucks to do it. But there was one caveat. Johnson had to give up his political aspirations.

Had he kept his promise to Black, who knows where Johnson would be today? But he used his clout at the helm of The Spectator and his column as a pulpit, and within two years, he was the Conservative MP for Henley, with the rest now evolving history — from MP, to Lord Mayor of London, to leader of the Leave movement that won the referendum to exit the European Union, to the present. There is no question he was a very peculiar choice for foreign affairs minister, particularly since he has a long record of offensive comments, for which he was assailed during his first press conference Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. During the Brexit debate, for example, upon hearing Barack Obama had removed a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, Johnson responded by saying, “Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” The Churchill bust, by the way, had been moved to a hallway outside the Oval Office, and replaced, non-controversially, by a bust of Martin Luther King. Johnson has described Hillary Clinton, likely the next U.S.

president, as having “dyed blonde hair, pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital.” During the Brexit debate, he described the European Union as an attempt to recreate the Roman Empire. “Napoleon, Hitler, (and) various people tried this out, and it all ends tragically,” he said. “The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.” Interesting people make for interesting times. Buckle up. Boris Johnson: a week with London's maverick Mayor - Telegraph Books Boris Johnson: a week with London's maverick Mayor Boris Johnson won’t admit that he has the prime ministership in his sights, but he has written a book about that other great political maverick, Winston Churchill. Gaby Wood spends a few days with the Mayor and tries to discover his intentions Boris Johnson, photographed exclusively for the Telegraph Magazine at the Savoy, London, September 2014. Photo: Nadav Kander Follow 'Why don’t we just write the piece collaboratively?’ Boris Johnson says when we sit down to begin this interview. ‘The Mayor, predictably, was late.

He stammered out an unconvincing excuse about the cares of his day job. And then professed not to know much about the subject upon which he’d agreed to be interviewed.’ ‘Although,’ I chip in, ‘he refused to say what he’d been doing for that hour.’ ‘Secret,’ Boris says, not dictating now. ‘I can’t tell you for security reasons.’ I go on. ‘He did say, however, that his job was going incredibly well…’ ‘It is.’ ‘… and that he was ploughing on towards the prime ministership.’ ‘Er, no,’ Boris says. It’s true. He didn’t say that. I knew the collaborative thing wouldn’t work. We are in the library of the Churchill Hotel in London, a decidedly unclubby room in a business hotel chosen for its namesake about whom the Mayor of London, now also a prospective parliamentary candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, has just written a book. Boris is his usual shaggy, bike-swept self.

This is the first interview he has given in order to promote The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, and immediately the obvious difficulty presents itself: is the book intended as a veiled self-portrait? A manifesto? Certainly, there has been no better time to ask questions about Boris Johnson and leadership; is The Churchill Factor Exhibit A? ‘It is very, very important to stress that this book is in no way…’ Boris says, trailing off. ‘I think it would be impertinent for any modern politician to invite comparison with Churchill.’ So you’re not comparing yourself to Churchill? ‘I’m explicitly disinviting the comparison, yes. Because it would be absurd. And indeed many people will use their opportunity to review this book to say how absurd that comparison is, so it’s very important for me to make that point for them first! If I were reviewing this book, I know what I would do.’ Yes? I say. ‘Well, I would immediately rehearse the superficial points of resemblance and I would show that it’s all complete bollocks!’ One of the secrets of Boris Johnson’s success is the pre-emptive rhetorical strike. No criticism or mockery can match what he has already inflicted on himself.

Even those who might want to laugh at him find that there is no such thing as laughing at Boris – you are always, inevitably, laughing with him. Today is no exception: he has foreseen all coverage, forestalled all criticism, with a familiar sweep of Wodehousian humour and theatrical modesty. The habit must be hard to kick: Boris is a narrator turned protagonist. His writings – as a reporter and columnist for The Daily Telegraph (since 1987), as editor of The Spectator (from 1999 to 2005), in books fictional and non- – have been collected into numerous volumes of greatest hits. Some of them can be found in the Politics section of bookshops, others in Humour – which gives you some idea of the many strands he has to pull together when presenting himself to the world. Name one other successful politician who has written a history of Ancient Rome and an ingenious parable about pushy parenting in the style of Dr Seuss (‘He’d zap the programme off and holler / Go and read some Emile Zola’). But what are those superficial points of resemblance between Boris and Churchill?

Well, to take a few samples from The Churchill Factor: Boris says Churchill was ‘funny’, ‘irreverent’ and – forgive me if this should be in a different list – ‘a glory-chasing, goal-mouth-hanging opportunist’. He is said to typify certain key British traits – a great sense of humour, eccentricity and individualism. Churchill was a maverick, not of the mainstream. He was a journalist. And despite his unplodding style, he worked incredibly long hours. (Boris, similarly, starts his day at quarter to six. ‘5.44,’ he says, to be precise.) Biscuits arrive to accompany our coffee. ‘God,’ Boris says. ‘All yours. I’m not allowed anything like that for the foreseeable future. I’ve got to get fighting fit. Mind you, Churchill… I discovered many amazing things about Churchill in the course of doing this book. I couldn’t believe how small he was. His chest: 31 inches. I mean, for Christ’s sake! And yet, somehow, he managed to act it out – it was all performance, projection.

He gave the air of massive bulk, and yet he didn’t really possess it.’ Whereas you… I prompt. ‘Whereas I, unfortunately… Although some people have been kind enough to say I don’t look as though I could conceivably be over 15 stone, I weigh almost 17 stone. Now, what else did I discover about Churchill?’ One of the things Boris describes is Churchill’s determination – a drive born partly from having a great deal to prove. Does he, I ask, feel he has been underestimated? Boris slurps his coffee in alarm. ‘On the contrary!’ he exclaims. ‘On the contrary. I’m a toenail.’ As campaign slogans go, it’s not necessarily bound to win. But then, with Boris, you never know. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aged seven. PHOTO: Boris Johnson Matthew d’Ancona, the Sunday Telegraph political columnist and author of In It Together, a recent book on the Coalition Government, thinks that within a year ‘we’ll probably know whether Boris Johnson is ever going to be prime minister’ . If the Tories win the next election, d’Ancona thinks it’s unlikely Boris would ever become leader.

But if Cameron loses, he says, ‘Boris has a very good chance, and that’s going to happen very soon. The crucial period in which Boris will have a shot at the top job within the party is imminent.’ So this book, whose timing can’t be accidental, might be seen, d’Ancona says, as ‘a personal manifesto by other means. Because he’ll be interviewed endlessly between now and the election, about the Tories, about Cameron, about his intentions, and all he’ll really be able to say is, “All I want to do is represent the people of Uxbridge and finish my term as Mayor.” This book is what a poker player would call the “tell”. It’s a gigantic wink to the gallery.’ How Churchillian is Boris, really? Andrew Roberts, the historian and biographer of Churchill, points out straight away that, unlike Boris, Churchill was for a time deeply unpopular. ‘One of the glories of Churchill was that he kept on saying the same unpopular things about Germany and the Nazis, and didn’t change his views at all. Whereas,’ Roberts speculates, ‘we don’t know whether Boris is someone who will change his opinion on things in order to stay popular.

If you’re loved, as Boris seems to be, you want to carry on being loved, and it can therefore be a weakness and a danger – it can have a very corrosive effect on a politician. The fact is that until Boris goes through a fairly prolonged period of unpopularity as a result of saying something that 90 per cent of people fundamentally disagree with – and then is proved right – it’s not a valid analogy.’ One of the well-known aspects of the Churchill story, however, is that he changed parties – he was a Tory, then a Liberal minister, then a Tory again. (Roberts says Churchill would have said it was the party that changed, not him.) Of course, it’s not remotely on the same scale, but I can’t help being reminded of a famous anecdote about Boris when he was a student – that having failed to be elected as president of the Oxford Union as a Conservative candidate he was voted in as a Social Democrat. It’s Boris who brings up the party-switching, when praising Churchill. ‘He had an amazing feel for the electorate,’ he says. ‘I mean, who else has ever jumped parties like that?’ Well, I say, you did it. Didn’t you?

At the Oxford Union? Boris looks aghast. ‘No…’ He mutters, and growls. ‘Oh, Gaby,’ he says, effortlessly suggesting that such a low blow had not been expected of me. ‘That’s a slight exaggeration. There’s no real comparison at all.’ He laughs a little. ‘What happened there was that I attracted the support of the Greens – I think – and the Communists, and the Monday Club, and the Right-wingers, and what were then called the SDP. I didn’t forbid them to support me.’ That was noble of you, I suggest. ‘I thought that was reasonable!’ So it wasn’t like standing as an SDP candidate, I say, attempting to clarify. But that’s how it has been projected. ‘I know,’ Boris says. ‘That’s a monstrous untruth. The Oxford Union isn’t party political.’ I ask if he would consider defecting now – it’s been known to happen, after all; Conservatives defecting to Ukip, for example. Would you do that? You’ve said you like Nigel Farage. ‘I wouldn’t dream of…’ Boris begins. ‘I basically believe in what David Cameron is doing and saying.

I think he’s absolutely right about the EU. And if you vote for any other party, then you will completely screw up our chances of a renegotiation, let alone a referendum. We haven’t had a referendum in this country since 1975 – it’s a scandal. And I think it would be a disaster if people are lured off into supporting anyone other than the Conservatives.’ You’re committed to the Conservatives? I say, quite annoying now, even to myself. ‘Totally.’ For life? ‘Well, I… I… You know… I cannot see any other party that interests me.’ (left) Boris at Eton, where he was a King's Scholar and (right) aged 18, before going to Oxford to read Classics. PHOTO: Boris Johnson You could interpret Boris’s professional trajectory as either a story about changing his mind or a story about finding solutions. In the late 1990s he said he wouldn’t be the MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator at the same time, but then he was.

He said he wouldn’t seek to re-enter Parliament in 2015, but then, in the small print, it turned out he had said ‘before 2015’, so 2015 itself was fair game. It seemed unlikely that he should be Mayor at the same time as standing as an MP but now that’s what he’s about to do. You could call this loophole-surfing, or an impressive act of plate-spinning. You might also think, at least he’s fulfilling his duties to both rather than abandoning one. Halfway through The Churchill Factor, Boris writes, ‘The beauty and riddle in studying the motives of any politician is in trying to decide what is idealism and what is self-interest; and often we are left to conclude that the answer is a mixture of the two.’ Some observers have wondered what Boris really believes in. There may also be a reason why people choose not to know the answer. As d’Ancona says, ‘I described him once as a blond screen on to which people project their hopes and dreams. You know, he has this appeal to the Tory Right, which is actually absurd, because, with the possible exception of Europe, he's more liberal even than Cameron.

The idea that he’s the great hope of the Right is preposterous. But that’s part of his talent – this ability to persuade lots of people that you represent them.’ I was struck by a line in the Churchill book in which Boris says his hero was able to defy so many ups and downs because he ‘had so much to believe in’. When asked outright about his own beliefs, Boris is perfectly direct. ‘I believe in a society that is liberal,’ he says, ‘and welcoming, and allows people to progress by merit. And has plenty of opportunity. And that isn’t judgmental about people’s foibles insofar as they don’t hurt anybody else. I think I’m basically a liberal Conservative – I believe in low tax, spirit of free enterprise, and in making sure that we as politicians create the framework for business to produce the dosh that we’re going to need to pay for the poorest. And the longer I live, the more I think that we all have a duty to each other.’ There you go: Boris, not joking.

One morning in September, in the City Hall building Boris once referred to as ‘the glass gonad’, the Mayor’s Fund for London, Magic FM and Kellogg’s are celebrating the fact that their charity has fed thousands of school­children via its breakfast clubs. As tables full of primary-school children are drawing and eating bagels, Boris puts in an appearance. He is interviewed on the radio. He is interviewed for TV – though not before he has done up the button of his jacket, with a flicker of disappointment at the fit. He struggles to think what he himself has for breakfast, ‘apart from the spaghetti left over by my children the previous evening’. He poses for pictures holding up a packet of Rice Krispies and then – perhaps thinking better of identifying too closely with Snap, Crackle or Pop – he puts it down and swaps it for Corn Flakes. His shirt now officially hanging out of the back of his trousers, he moves around the tables full of children. One 10-year-old girl shows him her drawing. It’s Boris in coloured pencil, with lots of yellow hair, bloodshot eyes of the kind you get in packets at Hallowe’en and a banana next to his head.

At the top of the page she has written, ‘Some People Belive BORIS was Living with Monkeys!’ He holds it in his hands, raises his eyebrows and erupts into boyish laughter. Really, Boris is more like a mascot than a mayor . We all recognise his gestures: the scowl of mock-annoyance, the ursine gait, the hand through the wilfully wayward hair. Watching him, I try to break this last bit down like a dance move (the Boris shuffle? The Boris hustle? The metaphors are too easy). I think it goes like this: up the side of the head, clutch the back of the hair, come forward with a slide, pat and ruffle. Is it a gesture of concentration or distraction? If you are like this – a showman, a celebrity, often a self-styled joke – how do you go from there to being a leader? Will enough people take Boris seriously, now that he has started out this way?

And if they do, as d’Ancona succinctly puts it, ‘does that mean that a funny, talented man can also be a serious, talented man – or does it mean that the whole thing has simply become a kind of cabaret?’ He is markedly different from American politicians – and actually, though I’m no expert on the rules, it occurs to me that Boris, who was born in New York, could conceivably be prime minister of the United Kingdom or president of the United States. (Perhaps, being Boris, he could do both jobs at the same time.) How would he play on an international stage? David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine and biographer of Barack Obama, suggests that ‘American voters, like British voters, have proven themselves able to elect idiots, heaps of them, but we tend to steer clear of wits. I’d like to think Mark Twain, or Jon Stewart, could win a seat in the very sad place that is the United States Congress, but I wonder.’ What is Boris’s plan? Isn’t that what everyone wants to know?

In a BBC documentary made last year by Michael Cockerell, he finally admitted, in tangential sporting terms, that he might not mind leading the party. ‘If the ball came loose from the back of the scrum, it would be a great thing to have a crack at.’ At the Churchill Hotel, we speak at length about Isil; about home­grown terrorism in London; about how this issue that seemed to be international had turned out to be domestic in origin, and what that meant for politicians here; about Boris’s regrets over his support for the Iraq war; and about whether, given that London is often said to be cut off from the rest of the country, being an expert on London meant that he was, by definition, inexpert about the rest of the UK. With David Cameron on being elected Mayor of London, May 2008 PHOTO: PA On all of this, Boris is unerring and articulate. There is an archetypal throwaway in which he refers to London’s melting pot as ‘the Moulinex’, and he describes politics as being ‘like a huge lumpy mattress: one thing goes ping, another thing boings up’.

But when I ask him why, given all these problems that require solutions, he wants to be prime minister, he becomes distracted by something that slipped out much earlier, which he asked to be scratched from the record. ‘I feel so bad about having said that,’ he moans, forehead in hand. It’s fine, I say. But you seem to be regretting it just at the perfect point when I’ve asked you the question you don’t want to answer. ‘Oh, golly,’ Boris says, before reaching half-heartedly for the mental script. ‘I want to fulfil my mandate as Mayor of London – see out the job, and, you know, spend the next 20 months of my mayoralty doing all these things…’ He starts to mutter. Yes, I say. You’ll do that, and then? ‘I’ll be a very old man.’ In less than two years you’ll be a very old man? (Boris is 50.) ‘OK, well then… Something will crop up.’ I’m afraid that at this point I burst out laughing. He is scraping the barrel of avoidance strategies. ‘That’s pathetic!’ I tell him. Boris attempts to smother a smirk.

‘We’ll see. We’ll see what that is.’ Then he puts on his frown of disapproval. ‘But that is not my purpose today!’ The evening of the Scottish referendum, Boris hosts a fundraising event for a charity of which he is a patron: Classics for All, which pays for teachers to be trained to introduce Latin in state schools. His father, the writer and former MEP Stanley Johnson, is there, too. The Johnsons are a hi-visibility family. There’s Boris’s sister, Rachel, a well-known journalist, his MP brother Jo (who is now part of David Cameron’s policy unit), and his middle brother, Leo, a sustainability consultant and the least outspoken of them all. Boris himself has a wife, Marina, and four children. ‘Some people might say, “Enough Johnsons – Ed”,’ Stanley joked recently, but there’s strength in numbers – they are unstintingly supportive of each other, while also being characteristically unpredictable. Over drinks, I ask Stanley whom Boris is named after. ‘Alexander?’ he says. (Boris’s full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, and his family still calls him ‘Al’.) He shrugs and smiles.

‘Alexander the Great, I suppose!’ Boris gets stuck in mid-air while riding a zipwire during the London 2012 celebrations. PHOTO: Rebecca Denton For the fundraiser, Boris has brought a plaster cast of Pericles from his office, where its usual role, he says, is to ‘watch me go on about bus routes’. ‘Round of applause, please, for Pericles,’ Boris announces to the assembled classicists as he steps up to the mic. In passing, as if it were obvious, he compares London’s cultural strengths to those of Periclean Athens – a favourite subject of his – then goes on to describe the modern capital as ‘the last place in Europe where we are still brave and quick-witted enough to take our lead from those soldiers who you can see on friezes, who were trained to leap – anabateis and apobateis – on and off – a moving chariot. As we do in London by boarding and dismounting from the open platform of buses!’ Within seconds, his voice has taken on the rhythm of an incantation, and as the tide of laughter from the crowd begins to rise, it launches Boris into a comedic fervour.

‘In spite of the safety fanatics of Brussels who tried to take them away! We have brought back that Great Periclean Tradition to our city!’ The speech lasts little more than five minutes. It is, not so secretly, about Scotland, since he cites Calgacus’s famous speech about Britain. ‘He was a bizarre-looking fellow, I imagine, Calgacus,’ Boris says in an aside. ‘Most of his body would have been covered in huge blue tattoos of animals. Much as people in Scotland are today…’ Cue peals of laughter from the crowd. ‘And as they are in England! – in case this is reported before the polls close.’ He ends by saying that if only Alex Salmond had studied classics rather than economics, the country would have been saved ‘a great deal of bother’. I imagine it’s possible to get a bit blasé about Boris’s rhetorical skills. But to me this speech seemed dazzling, not only for its combination of erudition and slapstick, but because it was all so impressively fit for purpose: of its moment, for its crowd, efficient, hilarious and to the point. During our original interview, I had asked Boris a question I knew would be an irritation.

‘I just have to ask you about your affairs,’ I said. ‘Right,’ Boris replied, before leaping into defensive action. ‘That doesn’t strike me as being a compulsory question! This isn’t on the syllabus!’ With David Cameron in 2012. PHOTO: Getty Images He was right. I didn’t have to ask. But the reason I did was because I wanted to know why exceptions are made for Boris. And also, whether he thinks exceptions should be made for him. On the latter, he appears to be democratic – one rule fits most. But on the former question, how has he emerged unscathed where others have succumbed to scandal? From his affair with Petronella Wyatt to his illegitimate child with Helen Macintyre, Boris has suffered the opposite of David Blunkett or Robin Cook or even Bill Clinton. ‘I’ve fought two massive campaigns in London, which got a huge amount of national scrutiny as well,’ he explains, ‘and my feeling at the end of them is that the public don’t really focus on that. What they want to know is what your agenda is, and whether you’re going to do any good in the job.’ Finally, something fairly obvious strikes me.

What if Boris has earned it? All of the ‘only Boris’ type of comments, which may sometimes seem admiring, are really the opposite. They implicitly suggest there’s something jammy about his relationship to the world. No one asks how a person gets away with things unless they think, on some level, that those things shouldn’t be got away with. But what if, instead of thinking of Boris as a witty chancer blessed with insanely good luck, we were to give him the benefit of his charisma, and decide he had won his popularity through charm, intelligence and hard work? As d’Ancona makes clear, a great deal of his appeal is projection: not all of Boris will turn out to be true. But for now any part of him might be, and we probably don’t have long to place our bets. The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Hodder & Stoughton, £25) can be ordered for £20 plus £1.95 p&p from Telegraph Books (0844-871 1514; books.telegraph.co.uk) - Signed copies available.

Boris Johnson will be taking part in a Q&A with Gaby Wood on October 23 at Imperial College London. Tickets are £40 (including a signed copy of The Churchill Factor) and are available from telegraph.co.uk/borisjohnson . Boris Johnson sacked by Tories over private life | Politics | The Guardian Boris Johnson sacked by Tories over private life Have we got news for you Boris Johnson sacked by Tories over private life Have we got news for you Gaby Hinsliff , chief political correspondent Sunday 14 November 2004 05.38 EST First published on Sunday 14 November 2004 05.38 EST Share on Messenger Close Tory MP Boris Johnson was sacked from his party's front bench last night over lurid claims about his love life. His fate was sealed by the mother of his alleged mistress, Petronella Wyatt, who said her daughter had become pregnant by him and had an abortion last month. Johnson, who is married with four children, had categorically dismissed the allegations only last week as an 'inverted pyramid of piffle'- and, crucially, he had assured Tory leader Michael Howard they were untrue.

Last night Howard said his colourful arts spokesman and party vice-chairman had been 'relieved of his responsibilities'. He is said to have been unable to forgive Johnson for having apparently misled both newspapers to whom he had earlier denied the allegations and Howard, who publicly backed him. 'This is nothing to do with personal morality. Last weekend when all this came up Michael stood by him and said shadow ministers can live their lives as they want, it was not a matter for him,' said one. But 'it is a matter for him when shadow ministers don't tell the truth'. Howard offered him the chance to resign, but Johnson insisted on being fired. The episode brings an end to an unlikely but uniquely engaging political career. Johnson, 40, who is also editor of the Spectator magazine, became one of the few modern Tories able to capture the public imagination, even provoking speculation he could be a future leader. He had already survived the now infamous Spectator editorial accusing Liverpool of wallowing in its grief over the death of hostage Kenneth Bigley, after visiting the city to apologise. But the saga of his alleged relationship with Spectator columnist Wyatt was the last straw.

Reports first emerged last weekend that Johnson, married to barrister Marina Wheeler, had had an affair and that his mistress subsequently had an abortion. While he denied it, when Petronella's mother Lady Wyatt was asked if the two were having an affair, she said tellingly: 'Not any more.' Today's Mail on Sunday claims Wyatt had two abortions, the last one paid for by Johnson, and that he had offered to leave his wife. Asked about the abortion claims, Lady Wyatt reportedly said it had been 'just one'. She confirmed the relationship to the News of the World, saying her daughter had realised it was 'going nowhere'. Johnson said last night: 'I am very sorry this decision has been taken in response to tabloid stories about my private life. I am very much looking forward to continuing to promote the policies we have developed on the arts, and will do my utmost to serve my constituents in Henley.'

Question: Boris Johnson was once the editor of which weekly political magazine?
Answer: SPECTATOR